No, I think the CCP's propaganda campaign is targeted more at its own people rather than foreigners.
Back in the 1970s, communist ideology lost credibility in the eyes of both the Soviet and Chinese people, so the ruling communist parties needed an alternative justification for their rule. The Soviet approach (which has now been taken to …
No, I think the CCP's propaganda campaign is targeted more at its own people rather than foreigners.
Back in the 1970s, communist ideology lost credibility in the eyes of both the Soviet and Chinese people, so the ruling communist parties needed an alternative justification for their rule. The Soviet approach (which has now been taken to an even greater extreme in Putin's post-Soviet regime) was to replace hope in a bright communist future, with the pride of feeling that the sacrifices of their people in World War II saved the whole world from the Nazi scourge.
The Chinese approach was to find legitimacy through prosperity: they achieved this using the same mercantilist economics as Japan and later the Asian Tigers, but with the extra boost given by China's unusually favourable demographics: the sudden collapse in birth rates (as Maoist pro-natalism gave way to the One Child Policy) gave China lots of hardworking young adults but few dependent children, (or indeed dependent elderly, many of whom would have died during the Great Leap Forward famines, or earlier at the hands of the Japanese invaders). Similarly favourable demographics gave West Germany its post-war Wirtschaftswunder, as the children born under Hitler's pro-natalist policies finally came of age.
However this meant that the Chinese economic miracle was doomed to run out of road in the 2020s as the large generation born under Mao became too old to work. The CCP thus desperately needed a new way to justify its rule, and has pivoted from "we knew how to grow the Chinese economy and raise your living standards" to "we are the only government that can properly protect its citizens from Covid".
Indeed, their various experiments in social engineering (to put it mildly) appear to have backfired, so on to the next experiment in social engineering, which also backfired, and so on. After the Zero Covid experiment is finally done, will they pivot back to Great Leap Forward 2.0 perhaps? I shudder to think!
I think neither the era nor the current Chinese level of development would permit a Great Leap Forward 2.0 to gain political traction: if Zero Covid fails badly enough that even the CCP cannot deny it (and the CCP doesn't fall as a result) then I suspect militarist nationalism would be the more likely go-to to restore faith in the regime.
No, I think the CCP's propaganda campaign is targeted more at its own people rather than foreigners.
Back in the 1970s, communist ideology lost credibility in the eyes of both the Soviet and Chinese people, so the ruling communist parties needed an alternative justification for their rule. The Soviet approach (which has now been taken to an even greater extreme in Putin's post-Soviet regime) was to replace hope in a bright communist future, with the pride of feeling that the sacrifices of their people in World War II saved the whole world from the Nazi scourge.
The Chinese approach was to find legitimacy through prosperity: they achieved this using the same mercantilist economics as Japan and later the Asian Tigers, but with the extra boost given by China's unusually favourable demographics: the sudden collapse in birth rates (as Maoist pro-natalism gave way to the One Child Policy) gave China lots of hardworking young adults but few dependent children, (or indeed dependent elderly, many of whom would have died during the Great Leap Forward famines, or earlier at the hands of the Japanese invaders). Similarly favourable demographics gave West Germany its post-war Wirtschaftswunder, as the children born under Hitler's pro-natalist policies finally came of age.
However this meant that the Chinese economic miracle was doomed to run out of road in the 2020s as the large generation born under Mao became too old to work. The CCP thus desperately needed a new way to justify its rule, and has pivoted from "we knew how to grow the Chinese economy and raise your living standards" to "we are the only government that can properly protect its citizens from Covid".
Indeed, their various experiments in social engineering (to put it mildly) appear to have backfired, so on to the next experiment in social engineering, which also backfired, and so on. After the Zero Covid experiment is finally done, will they pivot back to Great Leap Forward 2.0 perhaps? I shudder to think!
I think neither the era nor the current Chinese level of development would permit a Great Leap Forward 2.0 to gain political traction: if Zero Covid fails badly enough that even the CCP cannot deny it (and the CCP doesn't fall as a result) then I suspect militarist nationalism would be the more likely go-to to restore faith in the regime.